Memes

If there were an Olympics of likeability, Bert Le Clos would stand a very good chance of getting gold. Deadspin deemed his BBC interview “the media moment of the games” at the time, and to date it has scored over 353 000 views. #chadsdad trended in the UK and Bert became part of the cultural lexicon:
Considering asking Bert Le Clos to form a Government.— Prince Charles (@Charles_HRH) August 3, 2012
In fact, his only serious rival would probably be Oscar Pistorius, who manages to be inspiring, humble and nice (and very pleasant to look at too) which makes his a...

Unless you've just woken up from a coma, or have been tracking dangerous animals in wild over the past few days, you're probably aware that NASA's Curiosity Rover landed on Mars.
Millions watched the live stream, the NASA geeks went wild and people sent out some funny tweets. Standing out above them all though was Bobak, 'mohawked NASA dude' Ferdowski.
The flight director, who changes his hairstyle for every new mission, has captured hearts around the world. And of course, once he came to the internet's attention, he became a meme. Memeburn picked out nine of our favourite images from...

The media has been obsessed with the developments in South African president Jacob Zuma's Lenin-esque nude portrait saga. Brands and consumers alike have meanwhile taken to social media with offerings of their Spear of the Nation memes. Below is a selection of our favourites.
1. Gabriel's image is hard to absorb
Gabriel employs shock tactics.
2. John Terry
A meme within a meme.
3. Helen Zille
Tit for tat: the leader of the opposition is unknowingly pulled into the paint-slinging affair.
4. Spear Spies
Sports meets politics. Springbok rugby star Pierre Spies' surname coincidentally translates to 'spear'.
5. Britney
The celebrity pun meme is one of our favourites...

Comic-meme creation and consumption has taken internet culture by storm and seems to be only increasing in frequency and engagement. Memes come in all types but in this case ‘LOL cats’ and ‘Rage comics’ are being produced at a rate never seen before.
Ben Huh wants to turn this mechanic into news delivery. In a recent interview the man behind I can haz cheezburger spoke of how he sees ‘meme-mechanics’ as the future of news content distribution.
His argument centers on how subjectivity is king when it comes to content on the internet and a cultural shift is taking place,...

You could sense a nervous tingle as North Korea announced plans to send a rocket into space. Was it real, or just a front for deploying intercontinental nuclear missiles?
Then one of the world’s most isolated nations invited foreign press in for the launch. It was hoping to show off in a big way. It all suddenly seemed legit and, for some, a little more frightening.
Then the whole thing blew apart...

If there’s one thing the internet does really well, it’s compressing a serious issue into a captioned picture.
The Stop Kony 2012 campaign is a case in point. The campaign gave new meaning to the word viral, with Jason Russell’s documentary getting over 30-million views across Vimeo and YouTube in just two days.
Then came the counter-arguments. People pointed out that the Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) hadn’t been active in Uganda for the past five years. Others criticised Invisible Children for its apparently militant stance. Some even went so far as to suggest that the intervention it was...

The year 2011 saw the web become the great democratic tool it's always had the potential to be. That does not, however, mean it stopped doing what it's best at: providing us hours of meaningless entertainment with meme, after meme, after meme.
And while nothing in 2011 was able to unseat the cat as the king of the internet, more than a few put up a spirited fight for that top position. So here you go: some of the most noteable memes of 2011.
Rebecca Black
She was just a girl trying to make her mark in the music industry,...

Early this month, a bunch of kids in Queensland, Australia, created a Facebook fan page called "Sneaky Hat". The original page has since been taken down, but it has quickly been replaced with alternatives such as this one. If you thought Planking or HorseManing were weird, I have to warn you that clicking on a Sneaky Hat link while at work may be somewhat risky.
The new photo fad started with young men taking photographs of themselves naked except for a carefully placed hat covering their genitals. Of course, not to be outdone, young women adapted the fad to...

Almost better than any film adaption of a comic book, is the anticipation built up from the viral campaigns which leak out from the silver tap of Hollywood.
The internet has become a bridge which connects the public to their childhood memories and marketing agencies are quick to pounce on our nostalgia in the form of videos, online games and interactive websites which slowly reveal the next major blockbuster. In the past decade, the internet has assisted in marketing the release of a number of comic book films. Memeburn decided to take a look at some of the best....

Remember when that "Friday" music video by Rebecca Black hit YouTube? It somehow seemed to plague the Suggestions list for any video you decided to watch. Personally, I have never been a huge fan of popular music, so it really used to annoy me. Certainly it annoyed lots of other people as well, and the parodies came in their hundreds. Somewhere in that video was an awkward girl with braces, dressed in pink, who seemed to catch everyone's attention. Yep, 'That girl in pink' was the meme of the day.
Benni Cinkle's amateurish dance moves were immortalized in animated GIF...

The internet has been called many things, from "democracy's greatest tool" to the "greatest place for free speech". However, when you Google "internet's greatest" and it auto-completes to "invention of all time", netizens know what the internet is truly great at -- it's also a great waster of time.
While social networks, celebrity gossip sites or -- if you feel yourself to be a little more cerebrally gifted -- news parody sites are arguably the greatest sources of countless man-hours lost to web activity, the truth is that memes take up a fair amount of our time.
The meaning of...

It's been a fun week for memes with budding pop stars sensationalising the inner workings of the teenage mind on a Friday, to a bullied schoolkid unleashing a motherload of fury against his assailant with some signature Streetfighter moves, to blocking Charlie Sheen - because frankly, we've had enough of Charlie Sheen, tiger blood or not.
Here's our list of the top 5:
Rebecca Black - Friday
Amateur YouTube musician, Rebecca Black soared to fame for...

Ahh, it's love day. The traditional way of saying I love you is highly overrated. Roses are overdone, chocolates don't actually seem special anymore. Geeks out there need better ways of expressing their unique geek loves and today, when you need it the most, we have five new ways to do Valentine's.
The Twitter way: Get your geek trending
What better way to let your geek know that she or he is the center of your geekverse and the only person more important than your one terrabyte external hard-drive or your Xbox? Get your geek trending, mobilise all of Twitter for...

Who is the biggest internet star of 2011 so far? Lady Gaga? Eminem? Wrong. It's a fat, cross-eyed opossum from the Leipzig Zoo called Heidi. Check back through your forecasts by leading pundits about trends in 2011. I bet none of them saw that coming.
But with over 180 000 Facebook fans and a hit song on YouTube, Heidi is a veritable internet sensation. Her quirky, delightful appearance makes her instantly endearing and unforgettable. And the fact that she is woefully cross-eyed doesn't seem to affect her health in the slightest.
Possums, being nocturnal creatures, rely more on their...

Culture defines an era and the internet is our time’s Rosetta Blog. While the cultural touchstones might be ephemeral and fleeting, we have to realise and appreciate the journey that brought us here. An insignificant event or idea can gradually evolve into a complicated and awesome product that needs to be recognised. We need to embrace the year for what it has given us and Memeburn is proud to bring you (in no particular order) the Best Memes of 2010.
Still not sure what a meme is? It's an idea or belief, or pattern of behaviour that spreads...